I’ve adopted the policy of only buying a game if I plan to play it that day. Works well.

Also now that I’m unemployed I’m not buying anything. Reinstalled Morrowind (OpenMW) and realizing there’s quests I never even knew were here when I played this as a youth. It’s also super janky, but mods help.

Go lick some Nazi boots

If more people had voted against him, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

It would be illegal to set that house on fire and shoot them when they run outside. I’m sure some people would mourn the death of some flag waving nazi sympathizers. (I think this is one of those instances that only allows you to be pro state violence, anything else is gauche.)

The poll finds 35% of Americans approve of the way Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration

35% of people are liars or idiots

Fundamental attribution error

Yes! That’s it! Thank you

Wiki on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

On the other hand, we wouldn’t have climate collapse and microplastics.

True. There are also many idiots who think like, “I work hard and when I take a break it’s well deserved. When they take a break, they’re lazy good-for-nothings”.

There’s a name for this I can’t remember right now. Something more specific than “stupid” or “no empathy”.

I think if you’re sick and don’t have paid time off you should be allowed to vomit and diarrhea into your boss’s mouth.

Once that happens once or twice they’ll understand the importance of paid sick time.

Or we’ll learn they have a really unsettling kink.

Yeah this is one of the reasons labor needs to organize.

There’s one boss telling 500 workers that they all need to work themselves to death? Fuck that. We outnumber him. We could be productive without burnout and things could be fine.

It’s all about emotions and in-group belonging. All of us are subject to that, to some extent. But for some people it’s the dominant force in their lives. I don’t know how to fix that, because it seems kind of deeply baked in.

Is it running arbitrary python code server side? That sounds like a vector to do bad things. Maybe they constrained it to only run some trusted libraries in specific ways or something.

Reminds me of the fanclubwallet song “Solid Ground” https://fanclubwallet.bandcamp.com/album/you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me

“”"
sometimes you miss sleeping next to them even though if you don’t miss them anymore
sometimes the music’s different if you listen to it in your old bedroom
and if the friendship’s over you still remember the color of your shoelaces
“”"

I ran linux mint for a couple months. It was nice. Very few problems.

Unfortunately, when I tried to install it on this newer desktop it was a shit-show. No wifi or ethernet, no hdmi, it crashed when I tried to play elden ring. I should try another distribution, but I was so distressed after two days I just rolled back. The people in the mint discord were helpful, though, and got some of the problems fixed.

Windows sucks though.

I was on a grand jury some years ago in NYC. It really did a number on my faith in people and the legal system.

Now, a grand jury is different than a regular (petit) jury in a few key ways. First, you only need simple majority to move forward with an indictment. You can’t 12-angry-men hang a grand jury. Second, as I learned later, even if you do convince a majority to not indict, the prosecutor can just try again. So all those times the police didn’t get indicted for murder and the prosecutor just gave up? They could have tried again. They didn’t, because they didn’t want to.

All of that said, the cases were largely about drugs. People selling weed and heroin and the like. No violence. I suggested to the jury that we maybe just say no, and don’t ruin people’s lives over marijuana. You don’t have to show your work. You can just say whatever. The whole rest of the jury was like “are you insane?” Some of them were just anti-drug, full stop no context. Some of them were like “We have to do what they tell us” very obedient. Some of them just wanted to go home, and thought an indictment would be the fastest way.

They all voted to indict on every charge. The guy who was sleeping, and the lawyers and cops laughed at him snoring, also voted to indict.

I asked the little old white lady sitting behind me a hypothetical. I asked if she was on a jury in the 60s, and the charge was a black man eating at an all white’s diner, if she would indict. She was like, “Hmmm maybe.”

I tried. One of the cases the cops said they found a gun in the man’s house, so they charged him with intent to use it in a violent crime, or something. I was like, they didn’t even try to prove it was his or that he was going to use it. Everyone voted to indict. I’m just like, why do you have to make it easier for the police?

But don’t LLMs not do math, but just look at how often tokens show up next to each other? It’s not actually doing any prime number math over there, I don’t think.

Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It’s impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.

You find a tomb, but you know that whatever’s inside will be “level appropriate”. If you’re low level it’ll be steel weapons, and if you’re high level it’ll be daedric. There’s not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.

On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can’t really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It’s not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There’s a lot of “well, this guard is level 30 and you’re 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he’s not going to flinch.” Knowing you’re always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn’t be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it’s still a solid core gameplay.

Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.

There are many things wrong with the laws in the US. I’m not even sure where I’d start

But the other bigger problem is enforcement. Some people do a murder and get a nationwide search. Others the victims family get a “lol can’t help you”.

Recommend reading “the new Jim Crow” for one look at one part of this.

Looks pretty typical to me (longtime nyc resident). It’s rare to see trash, and graffiti is pretty uncommon. People sometimes think the subway is still like The Warriors where it’s just a wall of spraypaint, but not so much.

Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between “I thought they were going to investigate the smith, but they’re really suspicious of the wizard now and want to check her out first” and “they decided to forget about the whole civil war for the throne thing and open a BBQ joint for the local goblins”

Nowadays I’d probably just explicitly be like “Hey, so, when we started this game we agreed on a certain tone and direction. Specifically, it was going to be about a power struggle for the throne. Running a restaurant business in D&D sounds wild, but that is really a different kind of story and a different game. If you want to do that, let’s talk about it. Otherwise, I’m asking you to stay more on theme.”

Though I say that and my best game had plenty of “beach episodes”. One time literally, after they saved some sahaugin from being subjugated by a siren.